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March 7, 2014

Sim house – Sears plan #165, bungalow

If you haven’t been paying attention to what James is doing lately over at The Sim Supply, do yourself a favor and go check it out. Recently he released a new small island world called Aluna Island; the world grew out of a video series he did called “Let’s Create a World” and he has also built a section of his website to feature lots (all of which are available on the Exchange) that were specifically designed for the world.

My connection is that I have uploaded a few lots that I created for this world, and I’d like to share a little bit more about them with you here, mostly because the images that I am able to include in the lot packages don’t really show the rooms as well as they should. So here’s the first lot that I made and uploaded for Aluna Island.

The first lot I decided to build was a simple bungalow plan. It’s based on the plan for Sears kit house number 165 that was available in the 1911 through 1913 Sears Modern Homes catalogs, and was priced at $1,362. Architecture of the time, especially for basic houses, was fairly simple, and it was still somewhat of a novelty then for houses to be built with bathrooms, air conditioning and wired for electricity. The fireplace in the central hallway would provide heat for the home in winter, while opening the windows would get air flowing through to cool the house in the summer. Also prominent on this house is the expansive front porch, which would be used as an exterior “room” on warm days. The single bathroom is quite small and added onto the rear of the house behind the kitchen.

Adapting this plan for use in The Sims 3 was pretty straightforward. There are no diagonal walls and the roof is a simple peak, so there really weren’t any cheats that needed to be used to build this lot. I used moveobjects to get the porch and deck posts out to the edges, but that’s really the only cheats that were used here. The rooms in this adaptation are a little larger than they should be if the house was strictly built to the plans; this is mainly to accommodate the game and sims’ abilities to navigate through the house more than anything. This is built on a 20x30 lot; lot number 11 on Aluna Island. The lot itself is flat, and using one of the standard lot sizes with this flat terrain seemed a great way to start with this house building series.

I tried to keep the lot to just base game content, but as you can see on the download page (NOTE: this link may change once I have a chance to update the default screenshots with custom images) on The Exchange, there is some content from World Adventures, Ambitions and the Sims 3 Store. What is used should be easily replaceable with base game content. The decorating features wood floors in the main living area with linoleum and tile in the kitchen and bathroom and ceiling tiles in almost all of the rooms. I used a fairly basic color palette for this house, with the red wallpaper in the dining room showing the most vivid color. There is enough space in the backyard for some children’s activities and a reasonably-sized grilling and picnic area.

Here’s a tour of the lot in screenshots (click the images for larger views):

Now that this lot is built and has been available for a little while, I can start thinking about ways to improve it. The first update I’d like to try is to build this with smaller rooms that are more appropriate for the plan. This is a very basic house that should be affordable to sims as a first house, so I’d also like to try to get it down under $20,000 in sim currency. I suppose I would like to see the restroom closer to the center of the house, maybe where the fireplace is now, and the fireplace could be moved to the wall between the living and dining rooms, but I really like that the chimney comes out near the center of the roof.